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By Root 997 0

it a basic principle that all war plans should be formed in expectation of the unexpected. The warning to Graves was sent by England’s Swallow, with less speed than a frigate, not nimble enough to evade capture by three American privateers on Long Island Sound, leaving Graves unalerted to the approach of de Grasse. The anonymous privateers should have a niche in the history books. Hood too sent a warning letter which was also captured at sea, with the result that Graves knew neither of the English help nor the French menace that was on the way. When Hood arrived in New York Bay on August 28, he rowed over from his ship to Long Island the same day to confer with Admiral Graves, without result. They did not combine forces to sail into Chesapeake Bay in order to be ahead of de Grasse, as Rodney had planned. Although they agreed at their conference to sail in combined force for the Bay, they stayed in place for three days doing nothing. Even had they moved promptly, they could not have been in time to fill the Bay with British ships before de Grasse arrived there on August 30. It would have taken Graves, who was anchored inside New York harbor, the usual three days to come out across the bar at Sandy Hook. The fact is they did not move at all until August 31, but stayed where they were to wait for events.

Rodney’s plan to establish naval superiority on the Virginia coast either by the Hood-Graves combined forces or by the ships of Sir Peter Parker disintegrated, as the best-laid plans will when human agency is deficient. Graves, as he was to show, was never in a hurry, and Hood was not venturesome in America, no matter what Nelson said of him later.

Here was a situation in which the contingency was foreseen and the correct preventive prescribed, yet not taken. The question of English refusal to see their opportunities becomes insistent. Were they in a do-nothing trance because they were caught in a war they did not know how to win? Pessimism is a primary source of passivity.

As the only one of the English who took seriously and had long taken seriously the threat of active French intervention in America, why did Rodney not attempt, together with Hood, to intercept the French when they were in his own territory in the Leeward Islands, instead of leaving them to be intercepted after they had already reached America? This was the moment of vacuum. Rodney’s non-pursuit was not due to a desire to stay in St. Eustatius in order to take in as much as possible of the plunder, as his accusers, then and now, have charged. All that had been taken care of, as far as it was possible for him to do so; his booty from St. Eustatius had already sailed for England in Hotham’s convoy in March. Why did he not send frigates on reconnaissance to ascertain precisely where de Grasse had gone after he left Fort Royal, how many ships he was taking and a more exact date of his departure than “in a short time”? With that information, the combined forces of Rodney and Hood could very likely have crippled or stopped de Grasse before he crossed the Atlantic.

Rodney did not make that attempt because he felt his primary duty was to keep his ships at hand to defend the islands, because the time needed for repair of Hood’s crippled ships left him with inferior numbers and, most of all, because his physical miseries drained the spirit of enterprise that normally would have carried him to seek out and destroy the French in his own vicinity. A negative mission lacks the propelling impulse of a positive one. He made no search and found no combat. He determined nevertheless that he must join Hood in pursuit of de Grasse, with the lingering hope that in the sea air of a northward voyage his illness would recede. His orders to Hood to sail in search of de Grasse were issued on July 25. Sixteen days followed of repair and provisioning before Hood was ready to depart. In the interim, Rodney, in the severity of his ailment, felt that he could at last take his promised leave to go home for treatment of his stricture. (The word “prostate” was not then in use for the